Obituary: Michael Foot
Wednesday, 03, Mar 2010 01:38
Michael Foot led the fight for successive generations against appeasement, apartheid and nuclear proliferation, but he oversaw Labour's darkest hour and never lived to see Plymouth Argyle play in the Premier League.
By Matthew Champion.
Michael Foot, the Labour leader between 1980 and 1983 and an MP for 42 years from 1945 onwards, has died aged 96.
Born in Plymouth, Devon, Foot read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford before unsuccessfully standing for an MP as a 22-year-old in 1935.
Even back then the liberal-turned-socialist was already campaigning against rearmament, the intensity which he lent to this cause matching in turn the increase in the devastation of the weapons he fought throughout the 20th century.
Foot's moral compass attracted the interest of newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, who eventually appointed him as editor of the Evening Standard at the age of 28 during the second world war after spells at the New Statesman and Tribune.
Among the staunchest critics of Neville Chamberlain's policy towards Nazi Germany, Foot, who was rejected for national service due to asthma, co-wrote the best-selling appeasement polemic Guilty Men under the nom de guerre Cato.
During the war he also spoke out in the most eloquent and convincing of manners against Winston Churchill's attempted censorship of the Daily Mirror in one of his most famous speeches on protecting the freedom of the press.
In the decade after the war Foot was MP for Plymouth Devonport, later becoming a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957 before returning to the Commons in the 1960s as the leader of Labour's left in Harold Wilson's government.
As the party lurched further to the left in the 1970s Foot joined the government for the first time as employment secretary, fighting against UK membership of the EEC and entrenching the embryonic link between the party and the trade unions.
When Wilson left office he unsuccessfully contested the leadership with James Callaghan, although the deputy leader did not have long to wait; becoming leader in 1980 after Margaret Thatcher's general election victory a year later.
Already 67, Foot assumed Labour leadership at a time when the party's internal strife was reflected in the mood across the country.
And as Tony Benn and Dennis Healey led increasingly bitter factionalist contests for influence, Labour grandees Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers - the Gang of Four - left the party altogether to found the Social Democratic party.
In 1981 Benn challenged Healey for the deputy leadership but lost, with Foot credited with holding the party together through the sheer force of the affection he was held in.
But that affection did not extend to the right-wing press, who mercilessly and completely unjustly accused him of wearing a "donkey jacket" - it was in fact a Duffel coat that the Queen Mother complimented him on - at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day.
Despite Labour's internal woes the political scene in the early 1980s was just as fragmented, with the labouring economy hurting the deeply unpopular Thatcher government and the SDP earning plaudits from the public and mainstream media.
But victory in the 1982 Falklands war helped Thatcher to the most decisive general election victory in the post-war era the following year, with Foot contributing to his own party's downfall by relentlessly sticking to the principles on which he entered politics half a century previously.
His 1983 election manifesto, under which a young Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were elected for the first time, was dubbed the "longest suicide note in history" by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman for advocating unilateral disarmament, increased taxation and direct state intervention in industry, as well as a scrapping of the House of Lords and a nationalisation of the banking sector.
After the election, which saw Labour narrowly beat the SDP in popular vote but lose 60 seats overall, Foot resigned leadership of the party, to be replaced by Neil Kinnock, and returned to the backbenches.
Foot finally left parliament in 1992 and up until his death on Wednesday was remembered both for his pre-eminence as a speaker in the pre-television era of politics and for the conviction of his beliefs and generosity of spirit.
He also holds the distinction of being the only leader of either main political party since the second world war to retire and die without taking on any title; consistently refusing offers of knighthoods and peerages from Buckingham Palace.
Although he lived to see the end of the apartheid era in South Africa in 1994 with the election of President Nelson Mandela, two of his other lifelong callings remained unfulfilled, despite his endeavours.
His beloved Plymouth Argyle Football Club never quite made it to the top tier of English football, while nuclear non-proliferation remains as distant a dream as it did at the height of the CND, although the movement has been given new impetus by the words and actions of President Barack Obama.
Michael Foot: 1913-2010